Website Search Engine Ranking

You may have heard the term "SEO" (Search Engine Optimization) used when discussing how highly ranked a webiste is by search engines, such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo. This term refers to how easy it is for your website to be identified and categorized by the search engine. The process for getting higher rankings by search engines has been changing and the rules for getting higher rankings are often specific to each search engine.

Before spending a lot of time trying to optimize your website for the highest possible ranking in all of the search engines, it is important to clearly define the purpose for your website, the audience for your website, and understand the reason(s) why you want to be ranked high in a search engine. Most people use a search engine to find a generic product or service, and then click on the search engine links to explore each organization or company that caters to what they are looking for. In some cases, for a website that is very specific to a geographic region or perhaps a specific group of people, you may not need to promote your website in that same manner.

If you enter specific phrases in a search engine, such as Google Search or Bing or Yahoo, you will obtain a list of websites that most closely match the specific information you entered for the search. For instance, if you’re business is an antique furniture store located in Umatilla Florida, most people trying to find you will probably be local residents looking for your type of store in their town, so they would probably would include words like “Umatilla” and “antiques” or “antique furniture” in their search. If you have the word “Umatilla” and “antique” associated with your website, you will probably rank higher in the search output than perhaps a a large nationwide chain of antique-selling furniture stores!

In some cases, people will be searching for you because they found out about you through another person, a presentation you gave, a newspaper article, a business card, a flyer, or a brochure, in which your website URL was published. In that case, they would probably just type your URL directly, and since the URL is unique to your organization, you would be listed at the top of the search engine output list. Therefore, you may consider just submitting your URL to the major search engines (or just let them find you over time) and seeing if that brings you the number of visitors to your website that you expect. “For-Pay” services that the major search engine providers offer can be added later to boost your website ranking and visits, but these services can be expensive and you may need to consider what return on investment you expect before paying for that type of service.

Here are a couple of useful articles I refer to when talking about search engine rankings:

We have been heavily documenting the rise of Bing on this blog, and there’s no denying it has definitely improved Microsoft’s position in terms of search market share.

So now the question for website owners and SEO’ers remains – “How do I rank higher in Bing and drive more traffic to my website?”

While the jury is still out on definitive strategies for top ranking success in Bing, there seems to be a growing chorus of support for certain tactics, which I have detailed below:

Backlinks While backlinks are still used in the bing algorithm, it seems not to the same level as Google. Backlink counts for top 10 sites in Bing are much lower than Google, suggesting less importance.

Anchor Text It seems that Bing focuses more heavily on links with relevant anchor text, so that should influence your linking strategy – get your text anchor text right.

Onpage Optimization One of the more contensious factors, but many SEO experts believe Bing is weighting more heavily towards on-page optimization. Not sure this will remain the case, if in fact it is the case.

Age & Authority It appears that Bing places a higher weighting on site/domain age and authority than Google. Again a factor that is surely not sustainable given the importance of social media and blogs in terms of relevant results.

Below is a chart that SEOwizz produced based Bn some analysis they conducted. They compared the top 2 results for the search “SEO Services” in Bing and Google to determine what factors matter most for the two respective websites.

On Page Factors

Bing Site

Google Site

Title Tag

100%

100%

Density

3.8%

4.5%

Prominence

52%

46.9%

Link Density

2.7%

8.5%

Link Prominence

0.9%

4.3%

H1

Y

N

H2

N

N

Meta Keywords

N

Y

Description

N

Y

PageRank

5

4

Off Page Factors

Link Popularity

8120

19700

Link Diversity

1.27%

3.04%

"SEO" Anchors %

45.8%

97.2%

"Services" Anchors %

29.2%

21.1%

Domain Age

5 years 6 months

2 years 5 months

Linking Pages

"SEO" in body

55.8%

100%

"services" in body

67.4%

73.1%

"SEO" in title tag

4.7%

3%

"services" in title tag

9.3%

1.5%

Average PR of link

2.4

2.5

As you can see from the general consensus and SEOwizz’s experiment, the top ranking factors for Google and Bing do differ.

The important thing to note is that none of them compete, so to get Top 10 rankings in Bing and Google won't compromise each other. Smart site owners should be covering off the factors of each search engine to maximize their website traffic.

If everyone knew how to rank high in the search engines, no one would avail SEO services. But reality dictates that most people will never take the time to try out various SEO techniques and will have to rely on SEO services to help them out.

While there are thousands of different SEO companies out there, only a handful know how to increase rankings quickly. The mass majority of SEO companies out there only know how to increase links quickly. There is a huge difference between the two approaches.

This article teaches you how to rank high in the search engines. Here are all the steps involved if you want to do it on your own:

1. Start with a niche website. Do not choose a niche where the competition is overwhelming. Some saturated niches include the make money online niche, weight loss, credit cards etc.If you are a newbie online marketer, stay away from these niches.

2. Go to Google keyword tool. Put in some three-word-keywords relating directly to your product or niche. Think up keywords which a user will search for in Google to get to your website. The keyword tool will spit out various combination of long-tail-keywords related to your niche.

3. Choose keywords directly relevant to you. Delete any keywords which you are not 100% sure of. Only concentrate on keywords which 100% relate to your product or service.

4. Check the competition to see how many monthly searches are carried out for the keyword(s). Also check the number of competition pages by searching for exact phrase matches for the keywords in Google.

5. Only pick keywords which have around 500 monthly searches and which have less than 50,000 competing pages. There are lots of them out there.

6. Once you have a list of 4 or 5 keywords which fulfill this criteria, get quality links to your website with these keywords as anchor texts. You can buy links from high PR pages through SEO services out there or you can ask webmasters personally to do you a favor and put up your link on their website. You can also go to social bookmarking websites to submit a link.

7. Repeat process 6 a couple of times weekly. You can be sure to appear on page 1 or 2 for your target keywords by doing this.